Dig It

Spinach, coming up in the salad table.

With the close of last summer’s CSA came the decision to spend some time out of the farm fields and inside an office. This week, I reach the five-month mark as a Chesapeake Conservation Corps Volunteer, a yearlong position that has allowed me to promote, through a non-profit, both environmental stewardship and sustainable agriculture.

The opening of this door led to a demotion, of sorts: no longer a small-scale farmer or even a simple farmhand, I am now what some call an “avid gardener,” with a 625-square-foot community garden plot to prove it. But I look at this growing season as an adventure nonetheless, as I learn how to water a bed of just-planted seeds from three massive, but still empty, metal cisterns, or how to retain some semblance of sanity while digging up the little pieces of black plastic that were left behind by my plot’s previous tenants (who, I’ve heard, “just let the season get away from them”).

Much of this season’s preparations are similar to last’s: drawing a garden map, ordering seeds, lamenting the rain that keeps me inside. Only this time, I’m met with a smaller space and a bigger need to be creative. Instead of starting seeds in the heated (and oft-watered) greenhouse of those who so kindly lent me their land, I’ve started them in a structure I’ve cobbled together with two metal garden hoops and a large sheet of greenhouse plastic recovered from my parents’ shed. And instead of growing salad greens and cooking greens and head lettuce in ever-so-spacious beds, I’m growing them in a salad table that is nothing more than a re-purposed wood-framed chicken coop door. The plants, of course, don’t seem to mind the difference.

I read books about small-scale farming because it reminds me of why I do the job that I do. Farming can be demanding and difficult, but also satisfying in a way that other jobs aren’t. Perhaps it is the office (or lack thereof), perhaps it is the harvest, perhaps it is the fact that positive work means a positive mood. For me, being a farmer is being an activist, and making a difference can make you happy. The result of this summer’s work was, I hope, not just a heck of a lot of tomatoes, but the shared belief that supporting small, sustainable farmers is a good choice to be made. It is this choice that Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all about.

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The final boxes of the CSA season were filled with high summer harvests and all of the stored vegetables that I had been hoarding for use in case of a crop failure. I gave out cucumbers (until the vines died off a couple of weeks into September), eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, okra, basil and melons, as well as stored onions, garlic and spaghetti squash. I did have some trouble with cutworms in the tomato bed, but was able to beat them to the punch by harvesting the heirlooms at the first hint of blush.

I’m still returning to the farm once or twice a week, although with the cold, wet weather I’m predicting just one or two more weeks of vegetable harvests before we knock everything over and plant a cover crop in its place. In the mean time, I’m freezing what I can and getting ready to plant some greens in pots on the porch. After the jump, the recipes that I sent out. Below, some photos:

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Farming without chemicals means farming with a vigilance toward bugs, a fixation on seeking them out and squishing them yourself in an attempt to gain the upper hand in what can often seem like a losing battle. I’ve accepted this fact (and have spent a ton of time killing stink bugs and hornworms) but have drawn the line at swallowtail caterpillars, who are free to munch on dill and parsley and carrot tops to their little behorned hearts’ content.

After sending the subscribers snack bags of parsley week after early summer week, I stopped relying on the herb as soon as other things could fill its place. A few weeks ago, I noticed that more than 15 swallowtail caterpillars had taken up residence in the small bed, leaving bare stems behind as they prepared to become butterflies. And as I was harvesting carrots for the last time this summer, I noticed a black swallowtail butterfly fluttering around the veggie piles, seeking out a spot to lay her eggs. Some photos:

A post on the season’s last three subscriber boxes is forthcoming, but first: tomatoes! I grew both cherries and heirlooms this summer, several varieties of each. The soft and sweet garden peach stood out as a favorite of mine, but the subscribers fell in love with the cherries. Several people told me that the snackable little fruits were like round, colorful pieces of candy.

Since the spring, I’ve been nervous about no longer having fresh tomatoes to eat. It’s become hard for me to eat “fast food” tomatoes, and, as a purported advocate of Slow Food and seasonal eating, I’m hesitant to pick up a pint from the store in the dead of winter (and know that I wouldn’t be satisfied even if I did). So, I’ve entered preservation mode.

Several weeks ago, I laid hands on a bushel of seconds from the farm on which I worked in college. Not having the time nor the energy to process them then, I spent a quick hour cutting off the moldy bits and threw them in the freezer. This afternoon, I decided to turn them into sauce.

Using a recipe from realsimple.com as a guide (click here), I turned a couple of gallon-sized Ziploc bags of frozen fruit into the equivalent of three jars of sauce. As a bonus, I also ended up with several cups of tomato soup stock, made from the liquid that rose to the top of the at-first-far-too-thin sauce. The process took some time (about three or four hours from start to finish), but it was easier than I expected, and I did get five meals out of it. With just a few weeks left before this region’s first frost, I hope to do this at least once more before winter rolls around, stocking the freezer for the tomato-less months ahead.

Last week was fairly similar to the two before it, but yielded even more cucumbers (six in each box) and cantaloupe (two or three in each box). When I wasn’t harvesting, I was ripping off egg-covered cucurbit leaves and pulling up old squash plants in an attempt to give those pesky bugs less of a reason to stick around.

The rest of the box’s contents: one eggplant, two pints cherry tomatoes, one pint heirloom tomatoes, one pint tomatillos, four or five assorted peppers (green bell, purple star, sweet chocolate or ancho), one pint okra, one red and one yellow onion, one sandwich-sized Ziploc bag basil.

After the jump, the recipes that I sent out. Click images to enlarge.

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As August comes to a close, it’s time for me to start thinking of soil tests and cover crops and leaving the farm for the winter. But it’s hard to concentrate on all of that when the house is filled with the smell of cucumbers and cantaloupe!

The cucumbers were hard to start, with seeds not germinating and plants slow to grow, and the melons were planted rather late. But for the past couple of weeks, I’ve given out four or five cucumbers to every subscriber, and last week began what I hope will be a regular harvest of melons lasting through the rest of the summer season. Because I had no experience growing cantaloupe, I told my dad to pick out what we should plant. He chose two varieties: the two- to three-pound Isabella and the five-pound Ambrosia, both from Burpee’s. The smaller variety doesn’t slip off the stem like a ripe cantaloupe should, so it’s been hard for me to harvest them before the fruits split open in the field. The larger variety, however, has been a breeze to grow and pick, and is super delicious to boot.

The contents of Week Ten’s box: zucchini or summer squash, spaghetti squash, eggplant, cucumbers, one green bell pepper, two pints cherry tomatoes, one quart heirloom tomatoes, one pint tomatillos, one sandwich-sized Ziploc bag basil and one quart okra, for those who requested it.

The contents of Week Eleven’s box: cucumbers, eggplant, one green bell or ancho pepper, one pint cherry tomatoes, one quart heirloom tomatoes, one pint okra (for everyone), one bunch onions (one red, one yellow), one bunch carrots, one sandwich-sized Ziploc bag basil and one cantaloupe or watermelon for about half of the subscribers.

After the jump, the recipes that I sent out. Click images to enlarge.

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I’ve known since the spring that I would save whatever seed I could, to encourage self-sufficiency in whatever areas I could. Last week I brushed up on my seed-saving skills with this video, and then got to work processing the bundles that had been drying in the greenhouse. Below, some photos of the process. Click images to enlarge:

The contents of this week’s box: zucchini, summer squash, eggplant, three pints cherry tomatoes, one pint heirloom tomatoes, one pint tomatillos (the first of the season), two onions, one bunch garlic, mint and okra.

Declining squash harvests are still a disappointment, but I noticed new growth all week, including the ripening of a couple of cucumbers and two varieties of peppers (green and purple bell). And perhaps more importantly, the melons should be set soon. I spent a couple of hours earlier in the week placing cantaloupe on overturned flower pots, to keep them from rotting on ground that is too damp. I cannot wait to see a yellow one that isn’t rotten waiting in the field.

I’ve also been attempting to keep pests from harming our new squash plants, wrapping aluminum foil around their stems to stave off squash vine borers (the adults of whom are now out of the old squash plants and in the air, just waiting to do more damage) and checking their leaves for eggs. But the bugs can be overwhelming. Last week, I discovered grasshopper damage on now-chewed-down okra leaves, cucumber beetle damage on now-skeletonized pumpkin leaves and a new sort of egg (that of the leaf-footed bug) to worry about. I now understand the value of floating row covers—it might be a chore to hand-pollinate plants, but worth it to avoid all of these insects (and the egg-searching and pyrethrin-spraying that come with them).

After the jump, the recipes that I sent out. Click images to enlarge.

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This farm project is based on the idea of sustainable agriculture, which involves enhancing the environment as well as reaping resources from it.  Evidence of the farm’s environmental health has been most obvious, to me, in the number of birds that have taken to hunting for insects among the vegetable beds. I see mockingbirds and finches fairly often, but this morning was the first that I’ve seen a hummingbird at the farm, flitting from tomatillo blossom to tomatillo blossom.